Staff Reports
NS&D Monitor
3/14/2014
The NNSA’s Red Team investigating alternatives to the Uranium Processing Facility spent a whirlwind three and a half days this week at Y-12, getting briefings and an up-close look at the Oak Ridge plant’s uranium operations, and then adjourned to Oak Ridge National Laboratory a few miles away for discussions before heading home to further digest the information and think about possible alternatives to the Uranium Processing Facility. “It’s been a really active interchange,” ORNL Director Thom Mason, who’s headed the NNSA’s Red Team, said March 14 after the initial visit to Y-12 had wrapped up.
“The team has got a lot of people who like to poke and prod and ask tough questions and they’ve been getting good answers from all the people at Y-12,” Mason added. “So we’ve had tremendous support and I don’t yet know where we’re going with it because we’re still in this data collection mode. But we’ll get a better idea, hopefully, by the end of this week. We’ll have really outlined what our lines of inquiry are and that’ll allow us to leave with a few things under way so that when we come back—week after next—we can get some feedback to our questions and zero in on what the alternatives might look like.”
Visit a ‘Real Eye-Opener’ For Some
Mason said the Red Team has been in “receive mode,” gathering as much information as possible, but that’s about to shift. Asked about the team’s impression of Y-12’s decades-old production facilities that have been described as outdated and dilapidated, Mason replied: “Anyone who works in DOE has seen old facilities. And of course some of them have seen these facilities before, certainly the folks from the weapons labs are quite familiar. But there were some for whom this was the first time, and I would say—just from my own experience walking in—it’s a real eye-opener. And it puts a sense of urgency around the activity because you’re left with a strong sense that we need to do something about this sooner rather than later.”
Mason indicated that the age of the existing production facilities is a real conundrum. “Because of the nature of the operations and the hazards associated with them, it’s very, very difficult to make any changes,” he said. “And the unfortunate consequence of that is you can get stuck doing things in the way that you’ve always done them even though are much better ways to do them now because of the difficulty in making changes.” He added: “Part of it has to do with the fact that the facilities that are operating right now are not up to modern standards. So if you try to do something new, obviously that has to meet the modern standards. And so you can keep running something that you’ve been running for many years and you know you can run it safely. But if you’re going to make a change to it, you’ve got to make that whole change and you’re not going to be grandfathered in. You’ve got to meet all the modern standards. And that’s part of the reason it starts to get really expensive. I mean you’re looking at facilities that have tremendous requirements in terms of safety, security and all that sort of stuff, appropriately so.”
Avoiding a ‘Highly Imperfect Solution’
Mason suggested there could be tough times ahead if problems in putting together the perfect production facility cause the government to end up with the “highly imperfect” solution. “That’s a little bit about what I think the alternatives analysis is really at,” Mason said. “Things that we can do that will make sure that we can get into a sustainable mode for the longer term and get out of some of these really old facilities and not have it become so expensive that we can’t get there.’’
Mason said the Red Team was impressed with what Y-12 workers are accomplishing in the decades-old uranium facilities. “You come away with a real admiration for the people who are working in those conditions and able to do so … with tremendous precision,” he said. “I mean, this is not an unsophisticated activity that’s going on, but it’s going on in very unsophisticated facilities. So get is a sense of admiration for the people who are doing that. And a sense of responsibility to get them into a better situation. … You can’t ask people to do this indefinitely.”
